Actually, considering scale, that frog is probably only ten to 20 feet up at most, close to the cam and far from the rocket. Lifted by the shock wave probably.
Swampy there, maybe froggy survived the air blast and landed nice and wet and is OK with a story to tell.

I also suspect that the frog was probably already dead when the picture as taken – or could it have survived being ripped off the ground by a shockwave that lifts them 20 feet in the air, while being lightly toasted over an open flame?

Ground control to Rocket Frog
Ground control to Rocket Frog
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
Ground control to Rocket Frog
Commencing countdown, engines on
Check ignition and may gods love be with you…

This is ground control to Rocket Frog, you’ve really… wait…
Rocket Frog?
Ground control to Rocket Frog?
Houston, we have a problem.

Of course, everyone here is suitably aware and similarly aghast at the wildlife toll that has been happening over at Cape Canaveral since the late ’50s, and are completely aware of how (post)modern (obligatory wink) photographic technology can obtain lots of detail of how violent a rocket launch can be…as if none of us knew how violent it can in fact be near the base of every big rocket launch, including those that place earth-observing satellites into orbit to help us understand how we wreck the planet. Right?

After all, I do radar astronomy. And given what a few hundred watts of UHF does to a bee, you could say that I use the world’s most powerful bug zappers. The transmitter at Arecibo frequently fries birds. Every so often, somebody has to go out there with a sticky pad on the end of a stick and lift the debris off of the tertiary.

First-approximation photogrammetry: Let’s assume the frog is ordinary-frog-sized, at most the size of a stairway riser. And let’s assume that the stairway we can see in that gantry tower is built to human scale. On my computer, the frog is about the size of the arrow cursor, and the cursor covers about four or five steps on the stairway. So I conclude the steps are about four or five times farther away from the camera than the frog. That makes the frog’s distance to the camera about 25-25% of the distance to the rocket.

The tower is 18 fights of steps tall and there are 12 steps in each flight. If a step is 6″, then the tower is approximately 100 feet tall. The top story has distinctly different perspective; it looks like roughly a 45° angle of inclination, which puts the tower roughly 100 feet away from the camera. So the frog was ~20 feet away from the camera and ~80 feet from the rocket … but that needs adjustment for vertical angles, so the frog was probably farther away from the rocket when the picture was taken. But that says nothing about where it was when it got blasted.

Time for a trip to Google Earth for aerial photograph and to NASA for dimensions on the tower. Then to Second Life to see if I can reproduce the geometry.

I don’t think the frog got toasted. The rocket is hot, but there’s plastic bits and plants and stuff all over. We’d see big black toasty areas around all the launch sites.

Yeah – I bet it survived. If it had been killed outright by the initial blast it would not have had that nice angle of attack. It must have been thrown much higher and farther than 20 feet, though – more like several hundred yards. Landing safely would have been the main problem, but they’re pretty resilient.